Nicholas reminds us of the need to ensure effectiveness in the face of high efficiency:

“Beyond a certain point, that which is helpful and optimised can often become a hindrance and punishing. This is particularly true in the world of productivity. Thus the list is a marvellous and simple device to ensure recollection, to allow overview and to encourage prioritisation. However it can seduce into thinking the list is your sole world and encourage the forgetting of other potentially critical areas. E-mail allows fast, cheap, easy communication across the globe. However it does favour the electron over the emotion, on which more real high performance is so often solidly based.

It takes worthwhile discipline to recognise that any worthy system we have established which becomes too well-oiled, too efficient, too squeaky clean is maybe losing its effectiveness.“

Good stuff. Thanks Nicholas.